They say that if you want to catch fish, you gotta go where the fishermen ain't. My philosophy: You have to get your inspiration from places others don't or won't. Few things are worse than the parroting of wisdom received from folks who aren't all that wise. Also, this blog has a kind of cool acronym.

Everyone can agree that the complexity involved in public relations and marketing has skyrocketed in the past decade. The question is “How do we address this?” and “What can we learn from communities who have done so?” I believe that looking to open-source and hacker communities gives us the answer.

For the purposes of this talk, “open source” is defined as a
set of values and processes whereby a system is open to examination and any
modifications are shared. “Hacker,” in the ethical and non-pejorative sense,
refers to someone with a passion for learning how a system works as well as relentlessly
improving it.

There are at least five imperatives that drive the need for
the public relations community to adopt these important precepts. I will be
detailing them during my talk on Sunday.

1. Newsflash: Parts
of PR’s “Source Code” Are Already Leaking Anyway

The “operating system” (OS) of PR exists in a
semi-proprietary form across various companies, agencies and practitioners. For
those outside of the trade and the mediasphere in general, relatively few currently
know how this OS really works, why it
exists, why it’s important or what it is actually capable of doing.

That said, the source code for the PR operating system’s
various “features” and “subsystems” have been leaking onto the Internet for
some time. This hasn’t been due to a dramatic Wikileaks- or
Edward-Snowden-style
unveiling (which, make no mistake, is bound to happen eventually), but a slow reveal
over time. For example, think about the many ways pitches—certainly a core feature in
PR’s OS—have been examined
in public and, when maladroit, mercilessly
criticized. This is to say nothing of the subsystems for crisis
management or Wikipedia
engagement.

2. Open-Source Values
and Practices the Same Things the PR Industry Ought To

Openness,
transparency, accessibility… We frequently see calls from both within and outside the public relations
industry to adopt these principles—principles that map very closely to what
open-source communities and hackers value. While it’s presently naïve to think
that more than a small number of companies will go so far as to, say, lay their
product-design or engineering plans out there for the world (and competitors)
to see, I do believe that there is still a lot
of room for companies to make people participants
in their processes, rather than simply the recipients
of them. Opening, fostering and maintaining this necessary dialogue is PR’s
mandate.

3. Open-Source Is a
Proven Way to Deal With Complexity

Everyone can agree that the complexity involved in public
relations and marketing has skyrocketed
in the past decade. The question is “How do we address this?” and “What can we
learn from communities who have done
so?” I believe that looking to open-source and hacker communities gives us the
answer.

The open-source Linux operating system comprises 15 million
lines of code. It takes thousands of volunteers committing more than seven
changes every hour to make it work.
This is to say nothing of the volunteers who test, document, translate and
evangelize the operating system. Sometimes these volunteers severely
irritate the project’s founder, and some would maybe even hurt each other if they ever actually met. For
all of that potential chaos, however, this operating system powers 476
of the top 500 best-performing supercomputers out there, as well as
countless embedded devices.

Wikipedia is another
topic aboutwhichI’mveryfond.
This massively collaborative online encyclopedia has 29 million
articles in more than 240 languages, built by about 1.7 million volunteers (and
bots) who have each made at least 10 edits. On one hand, it’s difficult to
imagine how it hasn’t completely flown apart. On the other, only through an
open-source ethos can something like Wikipedia even exist.

I don’t pretend to have all
of the answers here, but looking at these examples is extremely instructive in
terms of looking at how we address PR’s own complexity issues.

One aspect of the Edelman Trust Barometer
that I’ve found interesting is that people (both the general publics that the
Barometer now polls and the media-attentive elites it has always looked
at) maintain a particularly strong aversion to hierarchy. Last year, CEOs and
government officials rounded out the bottom of this annual trust study, whereas
“a person like yourself” has continued to rise and is now among the top three
most credible company spokespeople. The top two over the past two years:
academics (or otherwise subject-matter experts) and technical experts within
companies.

But aren’t even these people at the top of a
“hierarchy” of sorts? Not necessarily. Just like in open-source and
hacker communities, these are people who command respect and because 1) they
have close-to-the-data knowledge, and 2) they are typically very open about
sharing it. So, it’s not so much that they’re “at the top,” but that they earn
respect through expertise and access.

5. PR Must Prove Its
Value to Online Communities or It Will Be Treated as a Software Bug or Network
Damage

Open-source projects come together and draw volunteers because
groups of people find shared, mutual value in doing so. If you have an itch to
scratch, someone else probably has that very same itch and is willing to help. In
a recent post
on my blog where I warn people to approach content marketing thoughtfully, I
urge the public relations industry to seek that mutual value, lest it be viewed
as a system “bug” to be fixed or ignored. “If PR inspires people to build
something that does to PR what TiVo was supposed to do to television advertising,
we'll know (perhaps too late) that we failed.” To survive as a discipline, we
must remain thoughtful, transparent and valued members of communities, rather
than just merely entities tasked with influencing them.

What to do in such an environment? My talk will offer
several remedies for consideration. In the meantime, sound off with your
comments on this post.

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